Join the Conversation

Taking stock of firearms coming into NJ: Editorial

Asbury Park Press
Published 2:10 p.m. ET April 19, 2018

Buy Photo

In 2016, Monmouth County's gun buyback program netted nearly 200 guns. The guns were tagged and laid out on a table at the Monmouth County Prosecutors Office in Freehold following the event.(Photo: Russ DeSantis for the Asbury Park Press)Buy Photo

Here are some quick facts about guns and gun ownership in America.
Wochit

Local law enforcement officers have for years been aware of an East Coast “pipeline” that runs along the Interstate 95 corridor south of New Jersey. And they are not talking about drugs, but about guns. They are talking about the so-called Iron Pipeline, and the relative ease with which firearms used to commit crimes in New Jersey arrive here illegally from other states.

The pipeline is no myth, but an actual problem — created in part by states that have more lax gun laws than New Jersey — that is a scourge for police departments and an obvious contributing factor to the state’s violent crime rate.

About 75 percent of traceable guns recovered by authorities in New Jersey are purchased in states with weaker gun laws — including Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina and Florida.

Too often, those guns end up in New Jersey’s low-income neighborhoods, where they contribute, along with gang influence, poverty and the drug trade, to violent episodes and lead to the deaths of innocents.

Pennsylvania, which requires background checks for private sales of handguns but not rifles and other long guns, has been the No. 1 source of out-of-state guns recovered in New Jersey each year for the past decade, according to data compiled between 2012 and 2016 by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF.

In 2016, for example, the most recent year for which data are available, the ATF successfully traced 2,477 guns that were either used in crimes or “found” in New Jersey. Of those, 412 came from Pennsylvania, while only 50 guns flowed in the opposite direction.

Gov. Phil Murphy, in his first months in office, has signaled he plans to attempt to find ways to stem the flow of these guns into the state, in part by “naming and shaming” other states by released data on where guns used in New Jersey crimes originate.

Meanwhile, relatively few recovered guns, or less than 3 percent, originated in New York, which shares New Jersey’s strict approach to regulation. Both states, for instance, require background checks for all gun purchases and ban many so-called assault weapons, among other restrictions.

Compare that with Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, which do not require background checks for private gun sales, or with North Carolina, which requires a license to buy handguns but not long guns.

“Gun laws work,” said David Chapman, a retired ATF agent who is now a senior policy advisor at Giffords, a gun safety advocacy group. “They are just compromised when states that are adjacent or at the other end of this pipeline don’t have similar laws.”

By way of an executive order signed by Murphy this month, the state will begin releasing periodic reports on gun crimes in New Jersey, including information on where they occur, the number of victims, the offenses charged, the type of guns used and where they were purchased.

As student survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre have reminded us since February, guns are a problem in this country. They are a problem whether used in a mass shooting at a school or a church, or in an act of violence on a drug-infested street corner in New Jersey.

Keeping better track of exactly how many guns are coming into our state, and where they are coming from, is a start — a solid, practical way to begin to address this problem.